It might sound uncharitable but Mark Steyn is far more clear headed about what this tragedy signals than those “saddy-saddy-sadcakes” who tend to ineffectual pacifist dreaming. It made him very angry … because he has been saying this for nearly a decade.

The European Union doesn’t need to imagine John Lennon’s “Imagine” because it lives in it. As I wrote nine years ago in my book America Alone:

“Imagine there’s no heaven.” No problem. Large majorities of Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians are among the first peoples in human history to be unable to imagine there’s any possibility of heaven: no free people have ever been so voluntarily secular.

“Imagine all the people/Living for today.” Check.

“Imagine there’s no countries.” Check. The EU is a post-nationalist pseudo-state.

“Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too.” You got it.

And yet somehow “all the people/Living life in peace” doesn’t seem to be working out.

As he rightly points out, “We sing the same crappy songs but we do not live in John Lennon’s 1970.”

While we were “living for today”, Islam was playing for tomorrow. When you sing “Imagine”, you’re saying you can’t imagine anything beyond the torpor of the moment. You can’t imagine that there are people who don’t think as you do, and who regard the cobwebbed boomer-pop solidarity as confirmation of nothing more than your flaccid passivity.